Across three continents and hundreds of attendees, our biggest RoachFest yet united a global community of architects, engineers, and innovators who share one goal: building systems that scale without fail.
This year’s theme — future-proofing database infrastructure for scale, agility, and performance — came to life through deep technical sessions, customer stories, and product announcements that redefined what’s possible with distributed SQL databases.
And now, every session is available to watch on-demand.
Relive RoachFest 2025 now!
Looking to re-visit RoachFest 2025? Or didn't get a chance to go? Get all of the talks in one place. Now's your chance to catch all of the insights on our RoachFest 2025 Hub. Learn from experts across industries on building resilient data infrastructure, distributed SQL, and more. Level-up your expertise today.
A Global Celebration of Scale
RoachFest 2025 took place across London, Bengaluru, and Las Vegas with each event tailored to regional industries, challenges, and opportunities.
London kicked off our global tour and set the tone with the release of CockroachDB 25.2, showcasing breakthroughs in performance and operational simplicity.
Bengaluru highlighted how fast-growing enterprises are scaling across regions and how CockroachDB 25.3 takes distributed resilience even further.
Las Vegas, our most exciting RoachFest yet, capped the series with sessions on Oracle migrations, AI-ready workloads, and a special guest talk from Kelsey Hightower of Google and Kubernetes fame.
From live benchmarks and demos to customer testimonials, attendees saw first-hand how CockroachDB helps organizations meet customer demand at any scale, anywhere in the world.
From Bottleneck to Breakthrough
As Peter Mattis, CTO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, reflected in London, “We’ve made it work. We’ve made it right. Now it’s time to make it fast.”
Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, added in Las Vegas, “With the scale requirements that have come with AI agents, databases have to get far more performance out of the same cost and hardware. A primary goal this year in addition to all of these amazing resilience advances was performance optimization.”
This year’s content centered on three key pillars:
Adapt to increasing customer demand for scale, agility, and performance.
Comply with global regulations through built-in resilience and data residency.
Consolidate workloads to massively reduce operational complexity and TCO.
The result? A reimagined foundation for modern data systems that perform without compromise.
Key Launches and Innovations
Across regions, RoachFest served as the launchpad for some of the biggest advances in CockroachDB’s history.
Product Announcements:
CockroachDB 25.2 and 25.3 delivered a new era of performance and reliability — including improvements in performance efficiency, fast restore, and cross-region managed backups and enhanced security.
Vector indexing introduced the ability to manage and query complex AI data at scale for GenAI workloads.
Cloud plan switching and Kubernetes enhancements simplified scale-up/down operations without downtime and simplified deployments in containerized environments.
Oracle migration tools made it easier than ever to modernize legacy workloads onto CockroachDB.
Each release built on a shared mission: to reduce operational burden, cut infrastructure costs, and let teams focus on what’s next.
Benchmarking the Future: Performance Under Adversity
A standout highlight of RoachFest 2025 was the unveiling of Cockroach Labs’ new benchmarking methodology, “Performance under Adversity.” This framework redefines how distributed databases are tested — not just for throughput and latency under ideal conditions, but for how they sustain performance when failure happens. And things always fail.
By simulating node outages, regional failures, and other real-world operational stressors, “Performance under Adversity” measures how CockroachDB maintains stability, consistency, and speed when it matters most.
It reflects our commitment to helping customers scale fearlessly — proving that resilience and high performance can (and must) coexist in modern infrastructure.
Each release and innovation built on a shared mission: to reduce operational burden, cut infrastructure costs, and let teams focus on what’s next.
Customer Breakthroughs
RoachFest 2025 wasn’t just about technology — it was about transformation. Enterprises from fintech to gambling shared how they’ve:
Scaled globally with seamless performance across hundreds of nodes.
Met data sovereignty and compliance goals with geo-partitioning and multi-cloud deployment.
Reduced TCO by consolidating multiple databases into one logical system.
These stories made it clear: modernization isn’t a buzzword. Today it’s a competitive advantage, and it’s becoming more and more of a necessity.
Community, Collaboration, and Insight
RoachFest once again proved that distributed SQL is a movement.
Attendees joined workshops, networked with peers, and heard directly from the engineers shaping CockroachDB’s future. Partners, analysts, and developers alike left with deeper insights into how distributed architectures are transforming the enterprise database landscape.
By the end of the global tour, one thing was certain: CockroachDB is the foundation for the next generation of applications — always available, always consistent, and built to scale.
What’s Next
The pace of innovation continues. From enhanced AI capabilities to new multi-region automation features, Cockroach Labs is building for the future — with performance that scales and simplicity that endures.
If you missed RoachFest 2025 or want to revisit your favorite sessions, you can now relive the experience anytime. See how global leaders are scaling fearlessly and building systems ready for whatever comes next. Hope to see you next year for RoachFest 2026!
